Racing to Justice

Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society

john a. powell. Foreword by David R. Roediger

Publication Year: 2012

Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future. Racing to Justice challenges us to replace attitudes and institutions that promote and perpetuate social suffering with those that foster relationships and a way of being that transcends disconnection and separation.

Racing to Justice

Title

Copyright

Dedication

CONTENTS

Foreword

In the late 1990s, partly because john powell and I were consulting at
Macalester College on their curriculum on racial justice, I attended a
keynote lecture on that campus by the late literary critic and theorist
Edward Said. His health already failing, Said spoke with even more than
usual grandeur and in passages...

Acknowledgments

The idea of collecting some of my essays came originally from colleagues
in social justice work who asked me to make more of my writing available
to those who do not routinely read law journals. Another friend
suggested a collection centered around my writings on identity, the self,
community, and social justice...

Introduction Moving beyond the Isolated Self

Justice involves claiming a shared, mutual humanity. It is about interrelationships.
Until now, every major attempt to achieve racial justice in
this country has come up short, and each time, we have seen race and
racial hierarchy reinscribed in different ways. Slavery gave way to Jim
Crow. The explicit discrimination...

PART ONE RACE AND RACIALIZATION

1 Post-Racialism or Targeted Universalism?

The United States made history on November 4, 2008, by electing Barack
Obama as its first African American president, generating a sense of
pride and a collective celebration that was shared worldwide. The installation
of a black president who was supported by a significant minority of
white voters was an occasion...

2 The Color-Blind Multiracial Dilemma: Racial Categories Reconsidered

What are you? What race are you? For some, the answer takes less than
half a second; others may need a paragraph to respond; and some may
have their own question: Why do you ask? For despite our obsession
with race, which sometimes takes the form of an aversion to discussing
it, our national discourse on the subject...

3 The Racing of American Society: Race Functioning as a Verb before Signifying as a Noun

The color-blind and multiracial issues are but two of the problems we encounter
in our efforts to understand race in a consistent and disciplined
way. Michael Omi, an important voice in this effort, identifies several
others, including the difficulties scientists encounter when attempting
to apply ostensibly objective...

PART TWO WHITE PRIVILEGE

4 Interrogating Privilege, Transforming Whiteness

Seeing and naming the whiteness of whiteness, then decentering whiteness
from its position as the universal norm, is an undertaking with
enormous potential for liberating our society. The necessary first step is
acknowledging that there is indeed white...

We are differently situated in today’s United States, not only as individuals,
but also as communities, with respect to history, ability, culture, and
access to opportunity. It is not these differences in our situatedness that
create the dramatic inequalities we see today; it is our societal and structural
responses, or lack of response...

PART THREE THE RACIALIZED SELF

6 Dreaming of a Self beyond Whiteness and Isolation

Some years ago, I conducted an exercise in a class on the history and
nature of the self. Most of the students in the class were white, and
most were law students. After reading some neo-Jungian articles about
dreams, and dreams in relation to identity, I asked the class how many of
them had ever dreamt that they...

7 The Multiple Self: Implications for Law and Social Justice

I frequently have difficulty sorting out how to think about a number of
issues in my life. The problem is not so much that I do not know what I
think and feel. Instead, it is that I think and feel many different and conflicting
things.1 Sometimes...

PART FOUR ENGAGEMENT

8 Lessons from Suffering: How Social Justice Informs Spirituality

Much of the literature on the relationship between social justice and
spirituality focuses on how spirituality has informed and inspired social
justice work. Relatively little attention is paid to how social justice might
inform the practice and development...

Afterword

We started this discussion by questioning the idea that the United States,
in electing our first African American president, is now a post-racial
society. I have explained why I think we still have some distance ahead
of us and have offered...

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